The Art of Builds (I)

When builds and build systems are discussed and argued about often a lot of terminology is thrown in like imperative, declarative, standardization and directed acyclic graph without having a clear definition and in-depth concept. In this session we will shed a lot of light into the dark with sometimes surprising results.

Builds and Buildsystems have been treated for many years not with the conceptual depth and principles they deserve and require. The lack of this is even more painful today as modern builds form a crucial part of a modern continuous delivery pipeline far away from the simple copy, compile and archive of the past.

You will learn:

• What are declarative and imperative build and build systems? Followed by an in-depth discussion about advantages and dangers of both approaches
• Why Maven is more imperative than you might think
• Gradle’s state of the art declarative approach shown by example of the new Gradle based Android build system.
• Why and what it means that builds should focus as much on developer productivity as on enforcing the software factory.
• The sweet spot in between standardization, declarativeness and necessary flexibility.
• Why also smaller projects should care about build system concepts (the larger ones don’t really have a choice.)

This talk is driven by many examples from Gradle, Maven or Ant builds.

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